Glory, Glory
by phollie
Summary: The teenage dream, the loaded gun. They're a product of wasted youth, but above all else, they're a product of each other. Mello and Sayu, a series of disconnected somethings, maybes, and nothings. M.
1. sans etoile

Uh oh. I'm in love with this pairing. Big tiems.

I don't know where this will take me, but my sudden uproar of passion for Mello/Sayu knows no bounds, so hopefully this won't be too much of a bumpy ride.

I don't own Death Note. The lyrics are "Night Drive" by Jimmy Eat World, which is BEAUTIFUL and should blare from the speakers of every fan of this pairing. I replay the line "give me everything you've got now" until my walls are screaming it.

* * *

**1. sans etoile**

/

_[now's the right time for a good song._

_get something to say that i can't._

_do you feel bad, like i feel bad?_

_pour us a road,_

_we'll both drink and drive.]_

_/_

Somewhere, the sun is up. But not here.

In the backseat of a hotwired car, the license plate stripped and one headlight burnt out, Sayu Yagami doesn't think the world has ever known a night this dark. Every tale of the commonly coined "forbidden romance" has told her that the sky should be riddled with stars, so many that it would rival those in her eyes, but nothing about this situation is cliché, from the drop-rise rhythm of Mello's chest to the pale peaks of her breasts exposed to his deadly blues.

Here in this starless place, they're an assortment of skin and breath; Sayu's feet are pressed against the window, her legs spread shamelessly to let Mello fall between them, and their hips, motionless and tense, are connected just from the sheer lack of space. Neither complain or make a single sound, save for the strained breath coming from Mello's scarred throat as he hovers above her, propped up on his elbows and lit somberly in indigo and oleander.

They've been reduced to glowing shapes in the dark, but Mello makes more colour than anyone Sayu has ever seen even in daylight.

She doesn't know what she's doing. She's not beautiful or intelligent or interesting. She's not Light. All these years spent being the little sister, the girl in skirts and sweaters, the notable but drearily average one have made her more than aware that she's not a special case when it comes down to anything. She hasn't changed the world or helped anyone. She hasn't even helped her poor mother, who sleeps next to a ghost every night, who could wake up at any moment and find that her daughter has vanished into smoke again. She hasn't even helped herself, when she turns on the radio just to hear some sound, some sign of life outside the white box of her bedroom before returning to the coffin of her own musings. And yet here she is, and here's Mello, staring down at her as if she's everything golden and together and _complete. _He looks a little broken himself, a little confused, even, but the fact that he's undeniably alive is enough to keep Sayu's gaze pinned to the point of his neck where blood flows the fastest.

Before she can lean up and kiss it, he distracts her with the feel of his hand atop her chest, resting on the place where her heart beats and thrashs like a robin caught in barbed wire. His hand is rough and too warm to be that of a dead man's, and Sayu _knows_ he's alive, _knows_ he made it out of that burning ninth level of hell that she imagines comes to him in fitful, raging nightmares. If this battered creature with the sharp shoulderblades and wandering hands and cloudy eyes ever sleeps, she's sure it's not for long.

Sayu hasn't slept in three days, but she finds room for dreams.

Her fingertips find solace on the creases of his hipbones; they remind her of the white, dog-eared pages of an old encyclopedia, printed with all the knowledge of the world that she never cared enough to learn. Mello tenses but doesn't look away from her, no, not for even the most brief of seconds that would be long enough for Sayu to figure out what exactly she's trying to get out of him here. She's touching him, she's imagining his blood flowing bright and rapid beneath the mottled canvas of his skin, and she's laying out her entirety for him in this criminal car, but as for why, and as for what, she just can't seem to trace.

Mello murmurs something in her native tongue, but she responds in his own. "No," she whispers. "English here. Speak English to me."

He falters, hand sinking into her heart, and something splinters in the air above their heads.

"Please," Sayu says. Her hands roam lower, from his hips to the flat slate of his stomach to the sweet swell of his being below it all. She feels him harden and tilt his pelvis into her touch, exhaling unsteadily at the contact. "Just English here, Mello."

His head drops to her neck, and what he mutters into her skin belongs to no language either of them know. From his cool lips spill everything Sayu never heard about in stories or on television or from the mouths of girls in high school bathrooms. They spin a series of sounds without a home.

This girl and this boy, they're a collection of shapes without a home.

"Please."

Mello steals her hands away from the majesty below his hips, covers his mouth with her palm, closes his eyes. They curl into a weave that can fit and cooperate prettily, piercing and gliding like perfect machinery, and up they go.

To the moon. She's flying up to the moon.

/

_[give me everything you've got now.]_


	2. comme la pluie

I like this one quite a bit. It's painfully AU, hope you guys don't mind too much. I don't know why they're at a train station and I don't know where Sayu's going, but the image was beautiful and so I went with it. I don't dare question my muse, he's kind of a bitch.

I don't own Death Note. The lyrics are The Airborne Toxic Event's "All I Ever Wanted".

* * *

**2. comme la pluie**

/

_[and then we find ourselves alone at the station,_

_and you smile like a child_

_and you tell me you want to be taken._

_i never thought you'd be the kind of girl to say that,_

_and you suddenly seem like this faceless thing in my breast._

_but i'd be lying if i said that i didn't find it exciting;_

_your eyes all wet and your face so warm and inviting.]_

/

The train station is a bleak, rainy strip of cement and graffiti, and Sayu's standing in a puddle the size of the Indian Ocean, looking at Mello with this _face_. It's a face that whispers of every defiant grace this girl has grown to adapt from god knows where, because Mello hasn't granted her any mercies or taught her how to make any faces worth stopping in mid-sentence for.

In fact, losing his entire train of _thought _for; he'd been on the verge of speaking, of thinking up something notable, before the girl's eyes had cooled over into something firm and unyielding, two dark beads made of the most unmovable stone, which are more dangerous than any bullet or blade could ever be right now. Hell, they could come sailing through the air ready and willing to tear through his flesh, but the second this girl's eyes fall upon him, he's a goner.

"What?" he asks, irritated at his sudden lack of self-regard. Pathetic. His guard is dwindling because of this girl, something he'll have to build back up and fortify into something resilient and dangerous like it used to be. "What are you giving me that look for?"

Sayu scans his face for a moment, her eyes never losing that glint of _something_, before her mouth breaks into a grin that stretches wide and proud across her upturned face. There are raindrops on her lips that sink into the slits between her teeth, and Mello wants to save them before they drip down her throat.

Still, he watches her, eyes narrowing and feeling his heart beginning to grow waterlogged beneath the soggy mess of his shirt. He half-expects to look down and see nothing covering him at all, because Sayu's rainy smile makes him feel so naked that he scoffs and crosses his arms over his chest in defense. "Jesus, Sayu, what is it alread-"

He's cut off with a quiet laugh issuing from her lips, and, shit, he doesn't think he's ever heard the girl make a sound like that, something so lost and happy ghosting its way through the rain and the fog hanging heavy over the station, and suddenly, he can't recall the mechanics of breathing. His eyes follow her as she bends down, takes off her shoes, rips off her socks, and straightens again. The pretty point of her chin is tilted up to him in a way that screams, _Destroy me. No, really. Go ahead._

Before Mello can attempt to speak, Sayu takes a mighty leap and splashes in the puddle, her bare feet slapping against the pavement and punching the grimy rainwater up to her knees. Her dress becomes splotchy and dark and marked with the degenerate acid rain of the city, and she's twirling and splashing and hopping around as if she's never known the concept of restraint or pain in her entire life. And Mello, he can only watch, his mouth tight and an ache mounting in his chest.

Jumping in puddles. Those days have been dead since the second he declared a not-too-wordless "fuck you" to Wammy's House, back in another world, another life.

"You wanna know something?" Sayu calls out to him, tossing her head back over her shoulder to look at him. Her dark hair is pasted down onto her forehead and caught on her lips, and she looks so beautiful and tangled here on the pavement, here in this filthy universe, that Mello has to clench his fists by his sides to keep himself from snatching her up and shaking her until her fizzy brain falls out of her ears.

Sayu laughs again, the sound bell-like and chirping, and she stops twirling in her ocean just long enough to breathe out, "God, I haven't done this since I was a _kid_."

Mello shoves his fists into his pockets and grumbles that she still is one.

"I remember," she says dreamily over the pounding of the rain, "I used to go outside every time it would rain like this, and I'd kick off my shoes on the front step and run out into the street..."

Squinting through a mop of dripping hair, Mello looks down at his shoes and tries to imagine himself in hers. All that comes to his head is a dark, confused cloud and a handful of shapeless figures, and he promptly shuts them out.

"My mother would call out to me from the front door and tell me to come back inside." Sayu laughs again, this time quieter. "She was so convinced that I would get sick or something, even though I never did."

Mello closes his eyes.

"And my brother, he would just stand next to mother and watch me, laughing the whole time like it was the funniest thing in the world that his little sister was jumping around in the rain. That's when he would get scolded, too, when mother would say, 'Don't encourage her, Light!'"

The rain comes down harder now, in chilling torrents and tempests, yet Mello can hear her splashing about again like a water princess. He squeezes his eyes shut tighter until bursts of light implode behind his eyelids.

"Really, I just did it because I knew Light wouldn't," Sayu says through a giggle. "But I knew he wanted to. So I did it for him."

Mello's eyes creak open. He finds her through the fog, his dancing water princess, and all he can think is, _Do it for me, Sayu. No one else._

Sayu's arms stretch up to the sky, her hands spreading wide open like porcelain saucers, and it's a knowing look to her right that lands on Mello, who stands tense and shivering and fucking _speechless_ in the middle of a rainstorm.

_No one else. Just me._

"You wanna know who I'm doing it for now?" Sayu's hands fall to her sides, bunching up her dress and wringing it out. The look on her face now is softer, different, unbearable to a boy who's only ever known rough, ugly things, things that kill and combust.

And he says, "No." He says it again, shaking from the cold and from the girl. "No."

The train comes groaning down the tracks now, a mighty and rusted thing that looks monstrous in the stormy glow. Sayu glances back at it, looks back at Mello, and raises her eyebrows.

"No," Mello says, watching the train come to a stop. "But I have a pretty good idea."

And standing on her ocean throne, in her royal dress of blues and greens, Sayu smiles.


	3. repaire des loups

So. Uh. HI. BEEN A WHILE, HASN'T IT. Even a year later, I still ship this like burning, so here we are yet again. /nervous laugh

Hope you all still enjoy le Mello/Sayu. 3

I own nothing, as usual. Lyrics are "Creation Lake" by Silversun Pickups.

* * *

**3. repaire des loups**

/

_the way things have fallen_

_can't be afraid anymore_

_first we were water_

_in creation lake_

_there are twenty-four parts in a day_

_that divides me from you_

/

They haven't known morning in one hundred years. Here, in the dark womb of a motel room, in a city full of nameless faces and equally faceless names, the curtains are bound together with safety pins to shut out any straying glow of copper and yellow outside. Out there, it's a balmy world of October that they've forgotten without so much as a wave goodbye.

But it's not morning. The clock can blink on 7:42 all it wants, and tiny teeth of sunlight can bite through the gaps in the curtains, but it's not morning. Not when Mello's here.

Sayu's lying naked on her stomach, the skinny thread of her body stretched out atop his own, and her hands are lost in the blonde crash of his hair. There are hot palms on her skin, one on her shoulderblade and the other on the humble hill of her bottom, and lips on her forehead that have tasted evils that only come to her in the most lucid of dreams.

Mello, she thinks, is something very much like a nightmare. She sees him. She watches that spark of fear flit across the blue of his eyes when he's almost there, almost complete, watches his face crack and contort in the final panting seconds of delirium - but most of all, she watches him right now, when he's down for the count and so eerily silent that it makes Sayu's ears ring like church bells.

This religion in her head is mounting into a crusade. Sometimes she dreams of crosses, thousands of them tucked into a vast expanse of black sand, endless, frosted over with ice, every single one of them sporting Mello's name. Every time, she tries to tear those hideous gray letters off, tries to scramble them into another name and throw them into the sea, but they always stick to her fingers and tattoo themselves into her skin, staining her, _marking_ her -

Mello lifts his head and presses his mouth to the white wing of Sayu's throat, and she stops thinking. He's murmuring into her skin, "Don't you have a home to go to?"

Sayu would go cold at that, if she knew anything but _heat-heat-pressing-heat_ right now. Nevertheless, she tilts her head back, exposing more of her neck to him, and says, "Maybe."

"'Maybe'," Mello repeats through an almost-laugh. It burns wild and bright against Sayu's skin, a dizzying stamp of breath. "Not so sure about that, huh?"

Sayu stays quiet. His breath speaks for her.

"I used to be like that, too," Mello purrs into her throat. "So eager to never have a home, to make out like some black wolf on the hunt, relying on nothing more than myself to survive."

This isn't like him. Sayu prides herself on not knowing too much about this fire-and-brimstone man, getting by on just enough of his fuel to keep her here (and it never takes too much; a winded breath here and there, a mournful crack in his voice, a glint of ice-blue in the midst of steam and flame), but this, she knows, isn't like him. Mello isn't a _used-to_ sort of man, whether it's what he _used to_ be like or the hideous things he _used to_ do. Whereas Sayu tends to live in a white-silk dream most of the time (or black-lace nightmares; those come in waves, too), Mello is right _now_ and right _here_ and let's _tear down this vision right now and right here. _

She envies him for that, she thinks. Just a little.

"I bet you've always wanted something like that, too." Mello tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear, the gesture quiet and curious and almost out of place. His eyes are fixed on her neck instead of her eyes; she can look at him freely now, can absorb his brightness without sacrificing any of their shared darkness. She watches his mouth, notes every shape it makes as he says, "You strike me as the type to want to destroy something every now and then."

Sayu furrows her brow at that, but not enough to suggest concern. It's a tiny note of recognition, the dot of a question mark that completes the symbol but doesn't commit to the question itself. _Destroy something,_ he says. _Every now and then,_ he says.

There might be some truth in that, actually. Maybe just a breath of it, just a little stitch of it. There have been times when, yes, maybe she touched the lace curtain of her window with the very tips of her fingers, feeling its softness, its girlish charm that hasn't been amended since grade school, only to be overcome with the sudden and insatiable urge to hook her fingernail into the tiny eyelet and drag until the entire curtain splits like a busted lip. Maybe, every now and then, she thinks about slinging blank paint onto her bathroom mirror, or pressing the left side of her face to the stove burner until her skin bubbles and tears and – and _scars –_

And on some untamed impulse, she asks, "What's it like?"

Mello's eyes lift, linking onto hers so intensely that Sayu swears she hears the sound of an engine revving in the back of her skull, or the fatal burst-fire of a pistol as it reminds its victim of their laughable mortality.

"What's it like," Mello murmurs, "to destroy something?"

Sayu nods, breathless.

For a long while, Mello stares at her with an expression that she doesn't think she's ever seen before. It's not anger, but it's not calm; it's not sadness, but it's not happiness; it's nothing that she can title, nothing that she can pin letters onto and call familiar, and that sends a molten ripple of fear to skitter through her stomach like a hot little coal flung out onto an icy ravine.

After a few beats, though, the look softens (or perhaps hardens, she can't really tell), and she thinks she spots a note of sadness somewhere on his face now instead of that unreadable, indefinable expression still burning in her gut. Mello's eyes drift off to the left, while Sayu's drift down to his mouth. It barely opens at all when he says, quietly, "You should go home tonight."

Sayu's silent.

"You should go home," Mello goes on, "and be with your mother. Take a bath. Put on something clean. Go to sleep and dream about…" He exhales, long-suffering, and mutters, "Dream about anything but destruction."

Sayu isn't sure exactly what causes her face to flush at his words, or what might explain the pathogens of embarrassment to ambush her bloodstream; whatever it is, it's potent enough to inspire a stunned blink of her dark, heavy eyes before she drops her forehead onto Mello's chest and simply breathes him in while she has him, here, in this dark tomb of a motel room that has likely known ten thousand souls before it swallowed theirs.

"Just…another moment." Sayu's voice is every hoarse and raw thing cutting out onto the shadowy silence as her fingers curl against Mello's lean sides. "Just one more moment, please…"

Mello's only response is a winded sigh and the lost, wayward tangle of his hands into Sayu's hair. Their bodies interlock one link away from perfectly when he rolls them both over and covers her with every scarred, ravaged inch of his body, impossibly warm, impossibly wanting.

Outside, everything is bright.


End file.
